


Though They Go Mad They Shall Stay Sane

by waitingtobelit



Category: Les Misérables (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Criminals, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, F/F, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Non-Explicit Sex, OT3, Other, Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-16
Updated: 2013-02-16
Packaged: 2017-11-29 10:55:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/686140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waitingtobelit/pseuds/waitingtobelit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marius’ life is a mess and he rather likes it that way. A thief and a flame ready to burst all in one entangled with a lark and her doll. Also known as Marius meets Cosette and Eponine at the same time and they corrupt him in the name of the greater good. Modern AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Though They Go Mad They Shall Stay Sane

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Emilie who prompted me with Marius and Cosette comforting Eponine as she feels down on herself in a modern setting. Then this prompt kind of grew a life of its own and hence this story as a result. I will most likely write a sequel to this when I finish all of my other current projects at the moment.
> 
> Warnings for sex, mentions of child abuse, and mentions of prostitution.
> 
> Also, the title comes from the poem “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” by Dylan Thomas, which you absolutely should read if you want more Les Mis/Amis feelings.
> 
> Disclaimer: I own nothing to do with Les Miserables. This was written purely for recreational purposes only. My apologizes to Mr. Hugo as I seem to enjoy hurting your characters too much.

The number three carries the events of his life in the same way his revolutionary friends uphold the flag of their beloved France. Three failed attempts to attend university to study law - the first because of his grandfather’s insistence, the second because the father he reconciled with on his deathbed desperately wished him to make something of himself, and the third because of an earnest belief that he could use the law to change the world. (He takes care now to target especially pompous looking students who believe too much in themselves and not enough in the world.) His first experience with failure bruised his relationship with his grandfather. The second tore it almost clean in half. The third set it entirely on fire, and in the flames Marius found his liberty.

Three times arrested for his revolutionary activities with the Friends of the ABC.  The first for intervening between an officer as he attempted to beat a child caught stealing, the second for getting caught with Enjolras throwing stones at the lavish home of a particularly revolting delegate of the National Assembly, and the third because one Director-General Javert never forgot a face when it came to breaking the law. He still wonders what the officer meant by muttering “I will find you yet 24601” under his breath as he carted him back to prison. (This being the most recent of which, only two weeks ago, which reminds him that he still needs to properly thank Courfeyrac for bailing him out. Again.)

Three times he met Cosette in a café close to the apartment he was then sharing with Courfeyrac and Jehan. Three times he fell more in love with subsequent meetings in the cramped but lovely building, with its walls a cheery yellow and tables and chairs painted mint green. She kept her golden hair pulled back in a messy braid, glowing even brighter against her dirt-stained cheeks so that it almost inspired him to poetry. In her mismatched, loose fitting brown sweater and jeans so full of holes they barely resembled trousers anymore, she reminded him of a fairy lost in the city streets. He wanted nothing more than to catch her.

He realized his mistake the fourth time he came to the café, determined this time to ask her out and perhaps attempt to kiss her. Clichéd, American indie wailing blared from the sound system as he made his way to their usual table in the back corner. Only this time, Cosette was already in the lap of someone else. A stranger with olive skin and messy, dark brown hair that flew out from under a Newsie cap in all directions as the woman he thought of as a fairy kissed with all the abandon of a reckless lover.

His blush deepened when Cosette turned and revealed that the stranger beneath her was, in fact, another woman. Marius could only gape like an idiot schoolboy as the two girls exchanged raised eyebrows.

“It’s alright, Eponine.” He’d just been able to make out what he assumed to be the other girl’s name, floating to him on the lilt of Cosette’s delicate voice.

 He made to back out of the café when he caught the shared smile, unfurling from Cosette to Eponine in such a serpentine motion that prevented him from moving. His fists clenched as he clutched at the fringes of his jacket and tried not to rock on his feet.

They moved in unison, Cosette rising from Eponine’s lap, Eponine rising from the chair, towards him with a slow and steady gait. Marius felt his stomach drop through him to his feet, which remained motionless as the women approached.

Cosette broke away from her lover then to capture his lips in a kiss as sublime and fleeting as her appearance. He remembered to breathe only when she had pulled away, tugging the world he once knew away with her laughing eyes. The softness of her lips haunted his heaving chest so as to disguise Eponine’s wisp of a grasp as she plucked his wallet from his back pocket. He blinked and they both had disappeared around the corner outside. He paused only for one second before running out the door, knocking over a plate of baguettes in his wake.

He ran as though answering Enjolras’ call to protest, the midday light almost blinding him as he searched desperately for some sign of either girl. His rent money was in that wallet, as well as a rather incriminating picture of himself running buck naked beneath the EiffelTower. (One of Grantaire and Courfeyrac’s mutual, especially terrible ideas after too much wine one July evening.)

A flash of gold, like a flicker of a braid in the wind, caught his eye at the end of the street and he pursued it, the pavement echoing with the smacks of his heavy steps. He had just turned the corner when two sets of arms grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. He didn’t have time to shout before Cosette was kissing him again and Eponine was leading them both through a decrepit turquoise door in a brick building one century too old.

Eponine pushed him backwards until the back of his feet stumbled over a mattress. Her tattered skirt brushed against the exposed skin of his abdomen as Cosette all but tore at his shirt from behind. Together, their deft hands rid him of his clothing as though he were a ragdoll. Their particular ministrations render him too stunned to do much more than writhe between them.

They conned him out of his virginity with all the finesse of master magicians.

In the afterglow, Cosette explained their story, her mother as a prostitute who left her in the care of Eponine’s parents who ran a successful (if not entirely honest) inn until only a month ago. Eponine informed him of the length and necessity of their friendship, how they learned to lean on each other in order to survive and avoid the pitfalls of Cosette’s late mother and the increasing wrath of Eponine’s family.

Marius observed how often their hands latched together, anchored to each other without effort. Cosette twirled her free hand in Eponine’s ragged hair as Eponine fixed the ends of her braid. Their noses met often as they rubbed their cheeks together, and he felt as though he were intruding on something much more intimate than either girl cared to admit.

Regardless, he moved in with them the next week, glad at least to give Courfeyrac and Jehan the privacy they deserved even as he felt himself spiraling more deeply within the unknown. He kept quiet at their unspoken insistence as Cosette instructed him in the arts of distraction, the way to smile at the right mark in the glaring sunlight so as to dazzle them like an angel, oblivious to the prying hands surrounding them. He followed Eponine like a loyal ghost as she demonstrated the best way to rake through a stranger’s possession with almost non-existent hands. They tutored him in the art of secrecy and somehow transformed him into a student in spite of his natural tendency of falling into everything.

Yet Enjolras found him out anyway. Marius expected some kind of explosive argument to follow, at the very least, a stern lecture, but found instead his fearless leader applauding him for obtaining skills to be put to use for their goals as a group. (“I’m not encouraging breaking and entering per se, but being able to pick locks and jump through windows are essential life skills, Marius.”)

Of course, the discussion ended with “don’t let the girls go to your brain,” but Marius had expected as much, considering Enjolras and his lack of interest in women in general.

And so he shed the last of his innocence along with the rest of his aristocratic veneer. His degree a distant dream, he descended into the life of an amateur thief with relative ease and little bruising. (Except for that one time he nearly toppled over a bridge by tripping over his own feet.)

The three of them come together like thunder, lightning, and rain to storm across Paris with as much force as can be found in the sea. Cosette with her wild eyes that inspire trust in every stranger that she meets, Eponine with her silver hands that pull miracles from the pockets too preoccupied with Cosette, and himself with his freckled face and full lips that mostly smile but sometimes salvage a plan gone awry in the back crevices of alleyways.

The first time he does it so as to protect Cosette and Eponine from that life neither of them should ever have to know. The second time, in the back room of the café in which he first set eyes upon Cosette, he does it for the promise of money they need for rent. The third time he has no excuse except the buzz he derives from being used that excites him in a way a loving touch cannot. The third time turns into the fifth turns into he’s lost count, by now.

Cosette and Eponine plead with him again and again to stop. He never listens.

 Since this development and his second time in prison over six months ago, he’s recently taken up what Cosette and Eponine both refer to as his superstitions. He reads tarot cards, he reads regular decks of cards. He wears old fashioned red scarves, cravats some might go so far as to say, around his neck like talismans and he never goes more than a few hours without a half-lit cigarette dangling from his mouth and one hand running through his perpetually tousled auburn hair. Courfeyrac refers to him as “my dearest hipster friend.” The girls call him their precious dandy as they nuzzle him into oblivion after particularly wild nights, and in those moments he forgets the shadow of himself that has only just begun peering out from the cracks in his skin.

Said shadow is at bay now as he lounges against a ragged pillow, lighting a cigarette as he settles on the king sized mattress in the middle of the floor that serves as both the bed he shares with the girls and the only furniture in the room that isn’t the broken table over by the window. The once white walls, stained from overuse and lack of care, form an imperfect frame for the scene. With his playing cards to his left, his body aches from a long night convincing their landlord that their day-late rent isn’t late at all. He inhales deeply, toying with an ace between two fingers. The smoke laces around him, thick as fog, so that he doesn’t hear the door abruptly open then close. 

“Christ, this place is a dump,” Eponine interrupts his reverie as she tosses her book bag, a tan, mangy thing bursting at the seams, at his stomach. The target hits its mark and he almost chokes on his cigarette. She pulls it from his mouth for herself as she settles next to him, shoving aside the pile of cards he’d been about to read and resting her head on his exposed stomach before he can react.

She remains silent for a bit, her nose crinkling and in the way she suddenly tenses against him, Marius recognizes the beginnings of one of her moods, one of the habits she’s picked up from spending too much time trying to maneuver the gutters.

“You know,” she says between puffs of smoke, “Montparnasse thinks you and Cosette make a striking couple.”

Eponine, as a waif in the crowd, never misses the whispers of awe that follow Cosette in spite of her equally as filthy appearance. She catches every glance thrown Marius’ way like bullets in the chest. She becomes young again, helpless to the whims of the world that tries to embed its own ugliness within her again and again. She cracks but she never fully breaks.

Marius glides his hand through her hair gently, starkly aware of the way her voice trembles at the word, “couple.”

“That’s his opinion,” he shrugs, beginning to stroke her head. “But he doesn’t know the whole story, does he?”

“Lots of people agree with him, though.” She twists her skirt in one hand and clenches her fist by her side. She speaks like a child left out in the rain. “They say you’ll make beautiful children together, one day.”

Marius disregards the ache in his muscles and moves so that he lies on his side and embraces Eponine completely. As trying as his night may have been, the resignation written plainly on Eponine’s face hurts worse than the bruise on his left hip. He refuses to let go even as she wiggles away from him.

“They don’t know what they’re talking about. How could they?” He nuzzles her and she starts to relax at his touch. “They’re all as daft as my grandfather.”

He kisses the top of her head as her smile unfolds against his forearm. He moves his hand to rub soothing circles in her back. He smiles as she exhales and sinks comfortably further into the mattress.

“And if they weren’t, how would we take all of their money, anyway?”

He never hears Cosette enter, the Lark once again displaying the talents she obtained in her youth. She glides to the opposite side of the mattress and looks down upon them both with all the fondness of an infatuated sprite. She drops her own book bag to the ground before flopping carelessly onto the bed, causing the worn thing to whine as though in pain.

Her golden hair, loose for once, and even more wild for the twigs and other debris caught in the tangles of it, drapes across Eponine and himself as she leans over them. She must have just come from one of her long walks, he thinks. Sometimes she’ll let one or both of them join her in the twilight or at dawn. Mostly, she walks with only her own secrets for company.

Cosette hugs Eponine from the other side so that they form a lopsided nest of limbs and hair. Her hand briefly brushes against his before she brings it to Eponine’s hair and begins to pull her hair out of her face.

“But you two look so right together,” Eponine all but whispers. “So perfect.”

“Hush,” Cosette kisses her then, deeply and with patience. “We are far from perfect, you know this.”

“Perfection’s overrated, anyway.” He says, planting kisses on her neck as Cosette begins to soothingly part her hair. _Besides, I’m the odd one out, really._ He keeps the thought to himself, though. “Who needs perfect when you’ve got us?”

“Both of us,” Cosette nods, kissing her with such passion that Eponine can only respond in gasps and whimpers.

Eponine pulls Marius forward into the kiss, passing her lack of breath onto him. Cosette pulls at his shirt so that it rides halfway up his chest.

The room comes alive with the song of their bodies, silencing even the jagged parts of them that don’t belong.


End file.
